Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth Century Paris

Dr Chris Pearson, University of Liverpool, UK, chris.pearson@liverpool.ac.uk

Word count: 12,960 (including notes and excluding the abstract)

N.

Abstract

This article analyses the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth century Paris, which

formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a

context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal

psychology, police officers, journalists and canophiles promoted police dogs as inexpensive

yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals.

Responding to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency, this article examines how

humans – in a particular place and time – conceptualised and harnessed animal abilities. It

argues that whilst nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is

a danger that it might become monolithic and static. In light of these concerns, it argues that

examining historical actors’ conceptualization of animal abilities allows us to get closer to the

historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, as well a

better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. For attitudes towards police

dogs were entwined with wider discussions on human and animal intelligence. Concerns that

police dogs’ abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities

echoed contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could

1

overwhelm human intelligence and morality leading to individual and collective

degeneration. It seemed to many that police dogs’ intelligence had not tamed their aggressive

instincts. These worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris

after World War One.

Introduction

In 1907 Clément Vautel recounted the story of Spot in Le Journal, a police dog who could

sniff out lies, infidelities and all kinds of human flaws. Alarmed by this ‘monster,’ the

Parisian police prefect orders Spot to be taken to the pound and shot, thereby fulfilling his

duty as a ‘defender of society.’1 Vautel’s article satirised effectively the claims made about

the powers of France’s new police dogs by journalists, canophiles and police dog trainers

who all celebrated the important role that well-trained, intelligent, sturdy and loyal police

dogs could play in securing France’s urban areas from crime and in protecting the law-

abiding citizen from the omnipresent threats of the modern city. Intense fears of crime

dovetailed with police professionalization and new understandings of animal psychology to

create the conditions for the emergence of Parisian police dogs. Their abilities became a

matter of public debate within the mass print culture of belle époque.2 From front page

splashes to short fait divers news items, numerous press reports represented police dogs as

emotional and intelligent individuals dedicated to fighting crime and evidence of changing 1 Clément Vautel, ‘La vie fantaisiste: chien policier,’ Le Journal, 20 April 1907.

2 Dominique Kalifa, Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2005), 257; Gregory Shaya, ‘The flâneur, the

badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1869-1910,’ American Historical Review 109:1 (2004),

41-77. By 1914, Le Petit Parisien, Le Petit Journal, Le Matin and Le Journal had a combined circulation of 4.5

million copies. Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 (London: Penguin, 2008), 404.

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human-canine relations. In this vein, René Simon argued that using dogs for police work

enabled them to fulfil their ‘social value’ as ‘vigilant defender[s] and protector[s] of our

security.’3 In particular, Simon and others portrayed them as canine defences against the

much-feared Apache gangs (roaming bands of unemployed youths so named for their

supposed tribal savagery), which bourgeois commentators commonly represented as violent

and unreformable obstacles to social order.4

Having spent much of the nineteenth-century combating stray dogs and the threat of

canine-borne rabies, Paris’s police force began deploying dogs for specialized police work in

the early twentieth century, a time of increased police professionalization and expansion.

Under the guidance of dynamic police prefect Louis Lépine, police dogs became part of the

modern police force, which was integral to the rise of ‘bourgeois civilization’ based on

liberalism, capitalism and the protection of private property.5 They joined customs and army

dogs as creatures mobilized to protect national interests from perceived internal and external

threats.6 But although their introduction was rooted within the particular conditions of belle

époque France, Parisian police dogs were part of the wider deployment of police dogs in

other countries, such as Belgium, Britain, Germany, and the United States, that took place

through transnational connections and exchanges.

3 René Simon, Le chien de police, de défense, de secours (Paris: A. Pedone, 1909), 32.

4 Kalifa, Crime et culture, 47, 66. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical

Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 196.

5 His-Huey Liang, The Rise of the Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second

World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1992]), 4; Kalifa, Crime et culture, 13. Lépine was

prefect from 11 July 1893 to 14 October 1897 and from 23 June 1899 to 29 March 1913. On Lépine, see Jean

Marc Berlière, Le préfet Lépine: vers la naissance de la police moderne (Paris: Denoël, 1993).

6 ‘Les chiens auxiliaires de la défense fiscale,’ Annales des douanes, 12:14, 15 July 1914; Jean-Daniel Lauth,

Etude sur la liaison par chien de guerre (Paris: R. Chapelot et Cie, 1910).

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Dogs are reasonably well-represented within the emerging field of animal history,

whose practitioners have shown how animals have constituted “human” societies.7 Historians

have examined police dogs to uncover representations of class and dog breeds, as well as the

mechanisms of racialized state repression.8 This article instead deploys police dogs, a

neglected aspect of French police history and French animal history, to explore nonhuman

agency, an increasingly significant area of scholarly inquiry across a range of disciplines.9 It

argues that whilst “nonhuman agency” is an illuminating and necessary analytical tool, it is

7 On dogs and history, see Aaron Herald Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the

Modern Imperial World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The

Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Neil Pemberton and

Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2007); Catherine Pinguet, Les chiens d’Istanbul: des rapports entre l’homme et l’animal de l’antiquité à nos

jours (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, 2008); Sandra Swart and Lance van Sittert (eds), Canis africanis: A Dog History

of Southern Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

8 Emma Mason, ‘Dogs, Detectives and the Famous Sherlock Holmes,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies

11:3 (2008), 289-300; Neil Pemberton, ‘Bloodhounds as Detectives: Dogs, Slum Stench and Late-Victorian

Murder Investigation,’ Cultural and Social History 10:1 (2013), 69-91; Meg Spratt, ‘When Police Dogs Attacked:

Iconic News Photographs and Construction of History, Mythology and Political Discourse,’ American Journalism

25:2 (2008), 85-105; Keith Shear, ‘Police Dogs and State Rationality in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa,’ in

Swart and van Sittert, Canis africanis, 193-216.

9 Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger (eds), Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Leiden:

Brill, 2009). On the history of French policing, see Jean Marc Berlière and René Lévy, Histoire de polices en

France: de l’ancien régime à nos jours (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2013); Christian Chevandier, Policiers dans la

ville (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). On the history of animals in France, see Damien Baldin, Histoire des animaux

domestiques, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2014); Ghislaine Bouchet, Le cheval à Paris de 1850 à 1914 (Genève:

Libraire Droz, 1993); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth Century Paris

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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also worthwhile examining historical actors’ conceptualization of animal abilities to get

closer to the stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, such as

police dogs.

Numerous philosophers and theorists have grappled with questions of agency, which

Julia Adams describes as connoting ‘capacity, power, free will, [and] action.’10 Despite

challenges from post-structuralist and other theorists, agency remains a key concern for many

historians with reason remaining a necessary condition of agency as it allows individuals to

break free, to greater or lesser extents, of their instincts, emotions, traditions, and social

structures.11 This conflation of agency with reason and, by extension, human levels of

intentionality, provides a formidable obstacle to the meaningful integration of nonhumans

into historical narratives. In response, animal studies scholars now persuasively ascribe

agency to animals. Often drawing on the work of actor-network theorists, principally Bruno

Latour, they argue that nonhumans display agency when they make a difference to human

activities, societies and identities. Agency no longer relies on human-levels of intentionality

or reason, instead emerging as a hybrid and relational achievement distributed unevenly

between humans and nonhumans.12 Alongside this decoupling of agency and human

reasoning, some animal studies scholars argue that certain animals also have agency because

10 Julia Adams, ‘1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History,’ Social Science History 35:1 (2011),

3.

11 Walter Johnson, ‘On Agency,’ Journal of Social History, 37:1 (2003), 113; David Gary Shaw, ‘Happy in our

Chains?: Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,’ History and Theory, 40 (2001), 1-9; William H. Sewell,

‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,’ The American Journal of Sociology 98:1 (1992),

19.

12 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005); Edwin Sayes, ‘Actor-Network Theory and Methodology: Just What Does it Mean to Say that

Nonhumans have Agency?’ Social Studies of Science 44 (2014), 134-49.

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act with a degree of intentionality.13 Dogs, for instance, can be agents because they have

unwittingly shaped the past and because they are capable of some skilful and intentional

action.14

Uncovering nonhuman agency allows animals to be incorporated actively and non-

deterministically into historical narratives.15 However, “nonhuman agency” can become

something of a monolithic concept. With this risk in mind, Susan J. Pearson and Mary

Weismantel have called on scholars to ask how nonhuman agency ‘has been defined

historically, and how agentive powers have been constructed and distributed through social

formations.’16 Frederick Cooper, meanwhile, has convincingly argued that analytical

concepts, such as “modernity” and “globalisation” can too easily become catch-all and blunt

explanatory concepts.17 There is a danger that nonhuman agency will fall into the same trap.

In light of these concerns, this article historicizes nonhuman agency by exploring how

human actors in early twentieth century France conceptualized the diverse abilities of the

animals with whom they worked. This means avoiding the term nonhuman agency

13 Tim Ingold, ‘The Animal in the Study of Humanity,’ in Tim Ingold, ed. What is an Animal? (London: Routledge,

1988), 95; Helen Steward, ‘Animal Agency,’ Inquiry 52:3 (2009), 226.

14 Chris Pearson ‘Dogs, History and Agency,’ History and Theory 52:4 (2013), 128-45.

15 Ted Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,’ The American Historical Review 107:3

(2002), 798-820; David Gary Shaw, ‘The Torturer’s Horse: Agency and Animals in History,’ History and Theory

52:4 (2013), 146-67; Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa (Johannesburg:

Wits University Press, 2010).

16 Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, ‘Does “The Animal” Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with

Animals,’ in Dorothee Brantz, (ed.), Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 27.

17 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge History (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2005), 113-49.

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throughout this article. For although journalists, canophiles and police dog trainers sometimes

described police dogs as ‘agents of the law,’18 they did not use the terms ‘agency’ or ‘agents’

as scholars use them today. Instead, they discussed police dogs’ intelligence, sensory skills,

emotions, trainability, and physical strength, which, under their guidance would allow them

to act in socially-useful ways. They also repeatedly stressed the crucial and transformative

experience of the training process: police dogs would emerge through trainers suppressing

some canine instincts and nurturing others. Without their guidance, trainers feared that the

dogs’ aggressive or wayward instincts would dominate. These portrayals of dogs’ multiple

and contingent capabilities help tease out the complexities and nuances that can sometimes be

obscured by the term nonhuman agency.

For discussions on Parisian police dogs’ abilities reflected and contributed to wider

deliberations on animal and human intelligence. The early Third Republic is sometimes

treated as a Cartesian moment as some Republicans celebrated René Descartes’ veneration of

reason, whilst it can be all too easy to assume that the Cartesian model of the ‘animal-

machine’ has dominated French thinking about animals. Yet the discourse on police dogs

made little reference to the famous philosopher. This was not so much explicit anti-Cartesian

as a by-passing of Cartesian tropes altogether.19 Instead, discussions of police dogs’ abilities

18 ‘Les chiens, agents de police,’ Mon Dimanche, 18 March 1904.

19 F. Azouvi, Descartes et la France: histoire d’une passion nationale (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 252-92. On the varied

reception of Cartesian views on animals within French history, see George Boas, The Happy Beast in French

Thought of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1966 [1933]); L. Cohen Rosenfield, From

Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1941), 205; Elisabeth Wallmann, ‘On Poets and Insects: Figures of the Human and Figures of

the Insect in Pierre Perrin’s Divers insects (1645),’ French History 28:2 (2014), 172-87; Peter Sahlins, ‘The Beast

Within: Animals in the First Xenotransfusion Experiments in France, ca. 1667-68,’ Representations 129 (Winter

2015), 25-55.

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had more in common with transnational debates on animal psychology during which some

early twentieth century psychologists claimed that certain animals, including dogs and apes,

possessed intelligence and/or language.20 The history of Parisian police dogs suggests that

these debates could at times be highly politicized, as well as having a very practical

dimension. It also underscores that discussions of animal intelligence were entwined with the

wider cultural understandings of human intelligence in the post-Darwinian world.21

For police dogs emerged at a time of shifting animal-human animal relations in

France as Darwinism, feelings of kinship with pets, concerns over animal welfare, and

xenotransplantations all questioned the sense of an unbridgeable divide between humans and

animals.22 The question of intelligence – human and animal – was fundamental as the

emphasis of influential doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists on instinct, heredity, the

unconscious, and the environment as scientifically observable explanations for human

behaviour gained a stronger foothold since their initial formulation during the monomania

controversies of the 1820s. Amongst these alienists was Théodule Ribot who believed that

free will and reason ‘were mere abstractions, the subjective aspect of co-ordinated

neurophysiological reaction.’23 Pioneer of crowd psychology Gustave Le Bon similarly

20 Donald A. Dewsbury, ‘Issues in Comparative Psychology at the Dawn of the 20th Century,’ American

Psychologist 55:7 (2000), 750-3.

21 In this vein, Edmund Ramsden and Duncan Wilson have convincing shown that changing notions of animals

and suicide echoed and informed psychological understandings of suicide in humans. ‘The Suicidal Animal:

Science and the Nature of Self-Destruction,’ Past and Present 224 (2014), 205-17;

22 Kete, Beast in the Boudoir; Christophe Traïni, La cause animale 1820-1980: essai de sociologie historique

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011); Catherine Rémy, ‘Men Seeking Monkey-Glands’: The

Controversial Xenotransplantations of Doctor Voronoff (1910-1930),’ French History 28:2 (2014), 226-40.

23 Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin-de-Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1989), 40.

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played down the role of reason ‘in the governing of men [sic]’ in his hugely popular and

influential Psychologie des foules (1895).24 Such increasingly prominent claims and the

search for the biological causes of madness and delinquency all challenged notions of moral

responsibility, human rationality and free will and constructed crime and other social

problems as diseases to be managed and contained carefully by the medical profession as part

of its struggle against national degeneration. This ‘revolt against rationalism,’ to borrow Ruth

Harris’ term, turned criminals into creatures governed by harmful instinctual impulses and

socially-destructive unconscious desires.25 As doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists

animalized women, criminals, alcoholics, the insane, vagabonds and sexual “deviants” by

stripping them of their freewill and reason, police dogs were conversely treated as beings

whose intelligence, and physical prowess, could be mobilized to defend civilized society,

even if fears about their violent instincts never died away. Police dogs became embroiled in

the fraught deliberations over the meanings of instinct and intelligence.

As well as contributing to the wider rethinking of intelligence and human-animal

boundaries in belle époque France, discussions of canine abilities formed the ‘agential

conditions’ within which police dogs operated. As Bob Carter and Nickie Charles argue, the

‘possibilities for action are conditioned by incorporation into human social relations. Agency

is thus always Agency in relation to other Agents and to what those other Agents want to do.’

Within this relational model of agency, police dogs are ‘agents in relation to human

dominated structures.’26 The police dogs’ abilities were both enabled and constrained by the

24 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997 [1895]), 137-8. On the reception of Le Bon,

see Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the

Third Republic (London: Sage, 1975), 3.

25 Harris, Murders and Madness, 14.

26 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles, ‘Animals, Agency and Resistance,’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour

43 (2013), 330-1.

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prevailing attitudes towards dogs and the training techniques of the time. The case of Parisian

police dogs shows that even when humans want to enhance the abilities of animals (as

opposed to seeking actively to subdue them) it is not always possible, not because of animal

“resistance” or lack of skill but because of deficiencies in the ways in which humans have

tried to mobilize and harness them.27 In their desire to de-centre humans as the driving force

of history by highlighting animals’ roles and “resistance,” studies of nonhuman agency have

arguably downplayed the conditions that structure the possibilities for animals to act: this

article attempts to redress the balance. Having cleared some of the theoretical ground, I turn

now to the promotion of Parisian police dogs before analysing training techniques and the

reception of police dogs on the streets of Paris.

The emergence of Parisian police dogs

By the end of the nineteenth century many Parisians had become obsessed by crime.

Fuelled by lurid stories in newspapers, magazines and novels, and following decades of

urbanization, worries of crime stalked the capital. Writers, psychologists, self-defence

experts and others portrayed the city as a dangerous place in which murders, robberies and

assaults could happen almost anywhere.28 Press reports depicted criminals as mobile,

27 For a critique of animal agency as resistance, see Chris Pearson, ‘Beyond Resistance: Nonhuman Agency for a

“More-Than-Human” World,’ European Review of History (forthcoming).

28 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des polices en France (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1996), 53-9; Aaron

Freundschuh, ‘“New Sport” in the Street: Self-Defence, Security and Space in belle époque Paris,’ French

History 20:4 (2006), 425; Dominique Kalifa, ‘Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in

Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ French Historical Studies 27 (2004), 176; William B. Cohen, Urban Government and

the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998), 82-4.

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anonymous, and violent, with Apache gangs amongst the most dangerous and anxiety-

provoking. These gangs were first named as Apaches in summer 1900, to underscore their

supposedly savagery, threat to civilization, and refusal to conform to civilized norms.

Reflecting French fascination with the Wild West, the term Apache turned the gangs into

obstacles to social progress and transformed Paris in a wild urban space of hunters (the

police) and the hunted (Apaches).29 A 1907 article in Le Petit Journal fretted that the capital

was ‘in the hands of vast criminal organizations’: Apache gangs ‘swarmed’ (pullulent) within

the capital and its outskirts, outnumbering and mocking the police’s ability to uphold law and

order. The Apache gang member had become ‘the king of the street’ and thrived within the

Third Republic’s supposedly lax criminal justice system.30

In this fearful atmosphere, how could the law-abiding citizen feel safe? Some turned

to self-defence techniques based on boxing and jiu-jitsu.31 Others turned to dogs. Previously

represented as loyal defenders of the private bourgeois home,32 police officials and dog

aficionados now fashioned dogs into allies in the fight against the criminalization of public

urban space. They portrayed police dogs as part of a broader improvement in human-canine

relations, with some inserting them into the wider narrative of rational progress being forged

in Republican France. Paul Cunisset-Carnot, a lawyer, politician and prolific writer on

29 Kalifa, Crime et culture, 47, 59, 63.30 Ernest Laut, ‘Le pays des apaches,’ Le Petit Journal illustré, 22 September 1907; Ernest Laut, ‘Police et

criminalité,’ Le Petit Journal illustré, 20 October 1907; Kalifa, Crime et culture, 258; Nye, Crime, Madness and

Politics, 199-200.

31 Freundschuh, ‘“New Sport”’; Louis Singer, Défendez-vous!: le “Self-Defence” (Dijon: J. Delorme, [n.d.]).

32 Jean Robert (Silvio), Le chien d’appartement et d’utilité (Paris: Librairie Pairault, 1888), 49; Kete, Beast in the

Boudoir, 47-8; Baldin, Histoire des animaux domestiques, 64-5.

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hunting matters, stated that police dogs proved that modern scientific curiosity, research and

discoveries now allowed humans to exploit better canine intelligence and capabilities.33

Dogs seemingly possessed the necessary physical and mental attributes to become

effective police auxiliaries. They could even counter some of the nefarious effects of urban

life on the human population. In line with biomedical theories that stressed that modern urban

life caused individual and national degeneration, social problems, such as alcoholism, and

crime, and with the Wild West seemingly in mind, René Simon claimed that 95% of modern

urbanites had lost the physical strength and keen senses of the ‘ancient Indian tribes,’ ‘valiant

pioneers’ or ‘hardy hunters.’ Yet the modern urban dweller was under constant threat from

silent yet deadly criminals, such as Apaches, who had, Simon’s text implicitly suggested,

retained the savage strength of uncivilized peoples. In some areas, ‘the bourgeoisie dared not

go out at night.’ Guns and other weapons were illegal as well as ineffectual, if their owner

could not detect the threat in time to use them. Simon identified dogs as the solution. They

had the ‘muscular suppleness, sensory sharpness, instinctive sense of smell, [and] alert

attention’ that the French no longer possessed. Simon believed that once a dog accompanied

every pedestrian the ‘bandits’ exploits’ would diminish.34 Although some French canophiles

fretted about the deterioration of French dog breeds,35 dogs, for Simon, seemed immune from

the physical and mental degeneration afflicting French society. At a time when middle class

tax-payers demanded that the police focus on securing the street from social disorder and

crime whilst influential Republican thinkers, such as Alfred Fouillée, advanced the right of

33 Paul Cunisset-Carnot, ‘Préface,’ in Pierre Saint-Laurent, Chiens de défense et chiens de garde: races,

éducation, dressage (Bordeaux and Paris: Féret Fils/L. Mulo, 1907), x-xii.

34 Simon, Chien de police, 3-11. On degeneration, see Harris, Murders and Madness; Nye, Crime, Madness and

Politics.

35 Bellier de Villiers, Chien au chenil, 117-18, 242.

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society to defend itself against hardened and incorrigible criminals,36 dogs’ sense of smell,

intelligence, trainability and physical prowess offered an effective solution to urban policing.

Like police uniforms, police dogs would give the policemen greater visibility on the streets

and underscore the state’s commitment to fighting crime.37 A 1907 article in Nos Loisirs

asserted that the dogs’ skills, speed, agility and biting jaws would strike ‘terror’ amongst

‘wrongdoers.’ It was entirely possible, the article stated, that murder rates would fall by 90%,

as they had reportedly done in Belgium.38

The reference to Belgium highlights how the deployment of police dogs took place

within the international promotion of dogs as skilled, capable and useful police auxiliaries.

Back in the 1870s, British police officer William Bolton had boasted of using dogs to hunt

down ‘social vermin.’39 However, William G. Fitz-Gerald, writing in the American periodical

The Century, identified ‘little Belgium’ as the main police dog innovator. He reported how E.

van Wesemael, Ghent’s police commissioner, deployed Belgian sheep dogs in the 1890s to

make up for a lack of manpower. Van Wesemael had harnessed the dog’s ‘sense of smell, its

instinct that all was not right, and its remarkable jumping and swimming powers’ to great

effect. Declining crime rates in Ghent encouraged the spread of police dogs to other cities in

36 Jennifer Davis, ‘Urban Policing and its Objects: Comparative Themes in England and France in the Second

Half of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger (eds), Policing Western Europe:

Politics, Professionalism and Public Order, 1850-1940 (Westpoint, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 7-8; Nye,

Crime, Madness, and Politics, 69-70.

37 Quentin Deluermoz, ‘Circulations et élaborations d’un mode d’action policier: la police en tenue à Paris,

d’une police “londonienne” au “modèle parisien” (1850-1914),’ Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 19

(2008), 75-90.

38 ‘Les chiens policiers,’ Nos Loisirs, June 1907, 683-4. See also ‘Chien de police,’ Le Matin, 4 December 1908.

39 William Bolton, Recollections of a Police Officer Relating to Dogs with Useful Hints as to their Treatment in

Health and Disease: How to Break your own Retriever &c., &c. (Southport: Robert Johnson, 1878), 12.

13

Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy and the United States, as well as in the colonies

of European powers.40 In France and elsewhere, police dogs provided an animal dimension to

the diversification of police powers, a key element of the modern state’s expanding security

apparatus at the turn of the century, as police officers and dog trainers exchanged knowledge

about police dog training across national borders, as well as actual dogs.41

Unlike the use of dogs to track down black fugitives in the South African

countryside,42 police dogs in Europe were overwhelmingly deployed in urban areas. The first

police dog arrived in France in 1905 when the police commissioner of Pont-à-Mousson

(Meurthe-et-Moselle), inspired by accounts of Belgian and German police dogs and

encouraged by the Eastern Canine Society (Société canine de l’est), deployed two dogs to

control the town’s numerous ‘brigands.’43 The following year the Society organized a police

40 William G. Fitz-Gerald, ‘The Dog Police of European Cities,’ The Century, October 1906, 823-31; Samuel G.

Chapman, Police Dogs in America (Norman: Bureau of Government Research/University of Oklahoma, 1979), 6.

41 For instance, British dog breeder and trainer Edwin Richardson sent police dogs to India. Edwin H.

Richardson, British War Dogs: Their Training and Psychology (London: Skeffington & Son, 1920), 38, 229. On

policing and the growth of the modern state, see Howard G. Brown, ‘From Organic Society to Security State:

The War on Brigandage in France, 1797-1802,’ The Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 661-95; Gary Kinsman,

Dieter K. Buse, Mercedes Steedman (eds), Whose National Security?: Canadian State Surveillance and the

Creation of Enemies (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000); Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The

United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2009); John Merriman, Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851 (New York: Oxford University Press,

2006).

42 Shear, ‘Police Dogs.’

43 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson: rapport du commissaire de police,’

Journal des commissaires de police, April 1907, 116. The recourse to Belgium and Germany, rather than Paris,

highlights how French provincial authorities were ‘curious about urban experiences abroad.’ Cohen, Urban

Government, 257.

14

dog show in Nancy at which Belgian and German police dogs, along with the two police dogs

from Pont-à-Mousson, were judged on their ability to find a hidden man, defend their master

from an assailant armed with a stick, and jump over obstacles (amongst other tasks). The

display impressed Lalloué, a policeman from Epinal (Vosges), who then obtained some

German Shepherds to train for police work.44 Meanwhile, Henri Simart, the Police

Commissioner of the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, went to study police dog training in Ghent.

Inspired by what he saw, and hoping to better protect his men following the murder of

Brigadier Fleurant, Simart secured approval from Neuilly Municipal Council in February

1907 to use police dogs to ‘purge’ the Bois de Boulogne of ‘disreputable people.’45

As the actions of Lalloué and Simart show, local municipal initiatives took

precedence over centralized and national programmes during the early stages of police dog

work in France, reflecting the weak centralization of French policing.46 However, national

societies and clubs soon sprang up to encourage the use of police and guard dogs. This

echoed other developments in urban security, in particular the rise of self-defence clubs. It

also emerged, in part, from the creation of numerous dog breeding societies following the

establishment of the French kennel club, the Central Society for the Improvement of Dog

Breeds in France (Société centrale pour l’amélioration des races de chiens en France), in

1882.47 The Police, Game-Keeper and Customs Dog Club (Club du Chien de Police, de

44 Saint-Laurent, Chiens de défense 9, 53-4; Paul Villers, ‘Le chien, gardien de la société,’ Je sais tout:

encyclopédie mondiale illustrée, vol. 2, July-December 1907, 362-3.

45 Villers, ‘Chien,’ 362-3; Archives de la Préfecture de police (hereafter APP), Paris, 138 W 1 ‘Mémoire sur la

brigade canine: projet de restructuration de la compagnie cynophile (Paris, September 1994), 2. Newspaper

reports portrayed the Bois de Boulogne as a poorly policed and therefore dangerous space plagued by

Apaches. ‘A l’hôtel de ville,’ Le Matin, 16 December 1908.

46 Berlière, Monde des polices, 74-87; Cohen, Urban Government, 81.

47 Freundschuh, ‘“New Sport”’; Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, 68-9.

15

Garde-Chasse et de Douanier) brought together members of the Central Society and

individual dog breeding societies, such as the Saint-Hubert-Club de France, as well as

politicians and police officials (including Simard). Its Committee of Patrons reinforced its

links with the French political and social establishment and included figures of political clout,

such the ministers of the Interior, War, Finances, and Agriculture, and the Parisian Police

Prefect, as well as such luminaries as Madame Heriot, Henri de Rothschild and the Duchesse

d’Uzès. Founded in Paris on 1 January 1908 and based at the Paris headquarters of the

Central Society, the Club established a kennel on rue Chevaleret in the thirteenth

arrondissement to train dogs for police work.48 The kennel’s creation underscores the

increasing institutionalisation of police dog work, matching developments in the promotion,

training and deployment of French army dogs in the early twentieth century.49

The Club’s membership made it a somewhat elitist organisation. In contrast, the

Union of Guard and Police Dog Enthusiasts in France (Réunion des amateurs du chien de

défense et de police en France), founded in 1910, portrayed police dog training as a useful

‘recreational sport’ suitable for all and an effective form of self-defence fit for a democratic

republic. The Union organized shows in which police dog skills could be judged. Like the

dog training manuals discussed below, the Union’s shows treated police dogs as sensitive and

capable creatures, rather than machines. Judges gave points to dogs for their ‘general attitude’

(allure générale) and up to 40 points could be awarded for such qualities as ‘love of work,

shrewdness, brilliance (brio), intelligence, instinct, atavism, will (volonté), [and] courage.’50

48 Status du club de chien de police, de garde-chasse et de douanier (Sceaux: Imprimerie Charaire, 1908), 1-7;

APP 138 W 1 ‘Historique du club de chien de police,’ 2. The kennel was later transferred to the eastern Parisian

suburb of Charenton.

49 Lauth, Etude.

50 Carnet de juge avec nomenclature des penalisations spécifiées dans le programme des epreuves concours de

dressage de chiens de défense et de police (Paris: Imprimerie française/Maison J. Dangon, 1913), 4.

16

The shows were frequented by establishment figures, such as President Armand Fallières in

1909, and were the object of enthusiastic press reports.51 They became showcases for the

dogs’ multiple abilities and won round at least one Le Matin journalist, who although already

a partial believer in canine intelligence, left a police dog show convinced that dogs possessed

‘a sense of duty to the highest degree,’ as well as respect for the law, a ‘love of property and a

hatred for bandits.’ The ‘future,’ therefore, ‘belonged to dogs.’52

There was a slippage between private and public institutions in the emerging police

dog world. Whilst intellectuals, journalists and politicians debated the role of private security

organizations in securing the public space of the city for the bourgeoisie,53 canophiles

promoted the use of privately-owned guard dogs and publically-owned police dogs,

sometimes within the same book.54 The public-private slippage continued once Paris’

Municipal Council agreed a budget of 8,000 francs on 30 December 1908 to create a police

dog service, following a policing report by municipal councillor Emile Massard.55 Although

the police prefecture bought seven dogs in 1908, six of its other dogs were privately owned

and lodged with individual policemen, 26 were hired from the Police, Game-Keeper and

Customs Dog Club from June 1909 onwards (for an annual charge of 230 francs per dog),

and twelve were donated by the writer, philanthropist and entrepreneur Henri de Rothschild

51 Réunion des amateurs du chien de défense et de police en France, Bulletin Annuaire, 1913-1914; Réunion

des amateurs du chien de défense et de police en France, Programme des épreuves des concours de dressage

de chiens de défense et de police (Paris: Imprimerie Française, 1913); ‘Les chiens de police luttent devant M.

Fallières,’ Le Matin, 10 May 1909.

52 ‘Chiens detectives,’ Le Matin, 16 April 1907.

53 Freundschuh, ‘“New Sport”’, 437-8.

54 Simon, Chien de police.

55 ‘Pour se débarrasser des apaches,’ Echo de Paris, 7 January 1907.

17

in October 1910.56 The vast majority of Parisian police dogs were privately trained and

owned and, in line with the view that police dogs were most effective in helping police

sparsely populated areas, they patrolled Paris’ outer arrondissements where open and

abandoned land was commonplace.57

There were no firm views on what type of dog was best adapted to police work. One

journalist asserted that as long as the training programme was ‘sufficiently methodical’ any

dog could contribute to ‘public defence.’58 However, most observers and practitioners treated

police dog abilities as dispersed unevenly and argued for particular dogs based on their breed

or individual character, inserting them seamlessly into existing dog breeding narratives that

stressed history, lineage, and hierarchy. The classification, standardization and promotion of

dog breeds during the nineteenth century also gave police dog trainers and handlers a range

of dog breeds to consider. Echoing the arguments put forward by noted French dog expert

Paul Mégnin and France’s increasingly vocal and organised pedigree dog breeders, one

observer advised police commissioners that pure breeds were superior to mongrels as training

was not everything; dog pounds and refuges were not places to obtain police dogs, just as

good servants could not be found in ‘vagabond asylums’ (asiles de vagabonds).59 In line with

breeders’ assertions that pure breed dogs were the product of rational selection, expert

56 APP 138 W 1 ‘Organisation d’un Service de chiens de police’ 23 September 1908; APP 138 W 1 Préfecture de

Police, ‘Minute: chiens de Police,’ 29 December 1910.

57 Berlière, Préfet Lépine, 14; Kalifa, ‘Crime Scenes,’ 182-84, 188-89.

58 ‘Les chiens policiers,’ Le Journal, 30 March 1907.

59 Niluar, ‘A propos de chiens de police,’ Journal des commissaires de police, May 1907, 144. See also Degoutte,

‘Conseils pratiques aux propriétaires & éleveurs de chiens de police et de garde,’ in Robert Gersbach, Manuel

de dressage des chiens de police, trans. Daniel Elmer (Lyon: Fournier, 1911), 11. Mégnin’s publications helped

popularize breed standards in France. Nos chiens: races, dressage, élevage, hygiène, maladies (Paris: J-B

Baillière et Fils, 1909).

18

knowledge, and prestigious ancestry, Robert Gersbach (a German breeder whose police dog

training manual was translated into French in 1911) advocated that police forces carefully

examine the potential police dog’s breed ‘history and development’ and try to locate ‘elite

subjects’ of the breed. Better still, the offspring of successful police dogs should be favoured

as they would have inherited the ‘moral qualities’ of their parents.60

Cartesian depictions of animals-machines were largely absent from belle époque

representations of police dogs: trainers and others overwhelmingly treated them as animals

rather than technologies, even if one journalist described them as ‘weapon[s].’61 Whilst

hardly freed from anthropomorphism, police dog trainers made serious attempts to know the

dogs as dogs so as to better harness their abilities for police work. They carefully considered

the mental, emotional and physical attributes of various breeds and, in an echo of racialized

classifications of humans, they divided dogs into different categories and established a

hierarchy of their intelligence, abilities and potential for police dog work.62 In trying to

establish which dogs were best suited for police dog work they also echoed the growing, if

contested, interest in measuring, assessing and ranking intelligence as pioneered in France

during the early Twentieth Century by Alfred Binet.63 As with debates over human

intelligence, the police tried to assess canine intelligence on a group and individual level.

60 Gersbach, Manuel de dressage, 11, 152. On breeding, see Baldin, Histoire des animaux domestiques, 116-7;

Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, 66-75; Ritvo, Animal Estate, 82-115.

61 ‘Les chiens policiers,’ L’Eclair, 4 March 1907.

62 Baldin, Histoire des animaux domestiques, 115-7; Jacqueline Duvernay-Bolens, ‘L’Homme zoologique: race et

racisme chez les naturalistes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle,’ L’Homme 35:133 (1995), 9-32.

63 John Carson, ‘The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental Order and Social Order in Early

Twentieth-Century France and America,’ in Shelia Jasanoff (ed), States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of

Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004), 185; John Carson ‘Mental Testing in the Early Twentieth

Century: Internationalizing the Mental Testing Story,’ History of Psychology 17:3 (2014), 251.

19

Some stressed particular breeds. Lalloué identified five main suitable breeds: Alsatians,

Airedales, Dobermans, and Belgium and French sheep dogs. Each of these dogs had their

advantages and disadvantages. Dobermans, for instance, were easy to train but could be

hostile to other dogs, whilst Airedales offered policemen a heightened sense of security but

were poor at jumping and running long distances. But of all the dogs, the Alsatian was the

‘ideal’ police dog due to its excellent sense of smell, trainability, loyalty and ‘very developed

intelligence.’64 Villers also identified the Alsatian, or German shepherd, as the best dog for

police work due to its ‘intelligence,’ ‘strength,’ ‘agility,’ and sense of smell.65 Joseph Couplet

similarly claimed that shepherd dogs were best due to their history of protecting sheep from

wolves.66 The shepherd dog embodied the perfect combination of canine emotional, physical

and cognitive abilities, as well as having long protected settled and productive human

communities from dangerous outsiders.

Other police dog experts were less concerned about breeds, placing greater stress on

individual personality. Saint Laurent agreed with the suitability of German shepherds for

police work. But he emphasised that the individual dog’s ‘personal qualities’ were more

important than its breed, especially as dogs of the same breed differed substantially. Rather

than belonging to a particular breed, a police dog needed to be ‘agile’ and of an ‘imposing

physique,’ as well as being ‘brave,’ ‘wary of strangers,’ ‘attentive,’ and having an ‘excessive

64 Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 15-19

65 Villers, ‘Chien,’ 367. See also Niluar, ‘Chiens de police,’ 143-4; Gersbach, Manuel de dressage, 168.

66 Joseph Couplet, Le chien de garde de défense et de police: manuel pratique et complet d’élevage et de

dressage, 2nd edition (Bruxelles: J. Lebègue, 1909), 44-51, 78. Gaston de Wael likewise recommended shepherd

dogs whose intelligence, ‘accommodating nature,’ and ‘stamina’ meant that it was almost as if nature had

‘prepared’ them for human use. Le chien auxiliaire de la police: manuel de dressage applicable au chien de

défense du particulier et au chien du garde-chasse (Bruxelles: Imprimerie F. Van Buggenhoudt, 1907), 25-39.

20

sense of loyalty towards its master.’67 Breed was not a reliable identifier of a dog’s aptitude

for police work and police dog handlers therefore needed to pay close attention to individual

dogs. In contrast to the quantifying aspirations of the Binet-Simon human intelligence test,

there was room for subjective assessments of individual dogs within the police dog world.

The lack of expert consensus on what type of dog was best suited to police work

partly explains why French police forces used a variety of dogs. Chance and cost also played

a role. The first police dogs in France – Achate (a bitch) and Argus (a dog) – were two

mongrels trained in Pont-à-Mousson in 1905. Although the Eastern Canine Society had

recommended pure breeds to the town’s police commissioner, the latter had accepted a

spontaneous offer of two free mongrels rather than find the funds to buy expensive pedigree

dogs.68 In contrast, Simart used Belgian shepherd dogs in Neuilly and when the Paris police

force obtained 10 police dogs in 1909, 9 of them were German shepherds (the odd one out

was a French shepherd dog). These choices were subject to close scrutiny. According to one

report, the police force had chosen German shepherds because they were more aggressive

than French dogs and therefore easier to train to attack people. L’Eleveur belge believed this

to be a mistake. French shepherd dogs were ‘rustic’ and ‘unpolished’ but some, such as

Briards, were spirited attackers if the occasion arose. German shepherds, on the other hand,

had an excellent sense of smell but were hesitant to bite. As the French police wanted the

dogs for protection, they were hardly an ‘ideal’ choice.69 The divergent views on these dogs’

abilities highlight how police dog experts treated canine qualities as diverse, as well as

dependent on breed and individual histories.

67 Saint-Laurent, Chiens de défense, 10, 17, 23.

68 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson,’ 116-7.

69 ‘Les chiens de police à Paris,’ L’Eleveur belge, no. 30, 25 July 1909, 475.

21

As with breeds, there was no consensus on the desired sex of police dogs. For

instance, although male dogs took the top three places at a police dog competition in August

1908, two bitches, Foullette and Mordienne, came fourth and fifth.70 And even though the

names of certain police dogs – ‘Garcon’ and ‘Moustache’ – contributed to the police force’s

culture of masculinity, police units deployed bitches.71 Furthermore, female police dogs

proved themselves effective agents in the field. They included Lucie, a German shepherd,

who reportedly used her intelligence and sense of smell to pick out two fugitives in crowded

bar.72 Moreover, Lalloué’s celebrated police dog Léni was a bitch. Rather than sex or breed, it

was a dog’s individual capabilities, not least its intelligence, and its response to training that

were paramount.

Training Police Dogs

Training police dogs differed from training army and customs dogs: the former would

operate in densely populated urban spaces where innocent citizens could be hurt by their

bites, unlike the battlefield or remote rural borderlands where army and customs dogs

operated. Police dog trainers therefore emphasised the importance of adapting dogs to the

urban environment, which they depicted as perilous, noisy, and teeming with dangerous

criminals. For although dogs from rural breeds already lived in Paris as pets and helped bring

livestock to the capital’s markets, police dog experts fretted about how well shepherd dogs

used to the calm of the countryside would adapt to the bustle of the city. They therefore 70 ‘Championnat des chiens de police,’ Le Matin, 17 August 1908.

71 Chevandier, Policiers dans la ville, 463. The French police continue to use male and female dogs. Richard

Marlet, Profession chien policier (Lausanne: Favre, 2011), 37.

72 ‘Les expériences de Vittel,’ La Presse, 8 August 1907.

22

advised trainers to introduce their dogs to the hubbub of urban life (including cabarets,

pedestrians and vehicles) from the age of eight months and expose them to gunshots: Saint

Laurent even suggested using a revolver to announce mealtimes.73

Training dogs for a crime-fighting role also necessitated engaging with canine

intelligence. Bitter experience had taught the Parisian police to take canine psychology

seriously. From 1900 it had deployed Newfoundland dogs to rescue people from the river

Seine, after the drowning of one of its employees. The rescue dogs, however, were not a

success and become the subject of numerous critical press reports. In response, the police

force asked Pierre Hachet-Souplet, Director of the Institute of Zoological Psychology and

author of numerous books on animal intelligence and training, to write a report on training

river rescue dogs. Like certain other proponents of the emerging field of animal psychology,

Hachet-Souplet viewed dogs and other animals, such as parrots,74 as intelligent creatures

whose psychology could be better understood through empirical observation. More

sophisticated understandings of animal psychology would, Hachet-Souplet believed, allow

humans to train dogs more effectively and so better secure their obedience. By the time

Hachet-Souplet’s report came out in 1907, the Parisian police had already abandoned the use

of rescue dogs.75 Nonetheless, his report highlights how considerations of canine psychology

informed the police force’s mobilization of dogs.

Now largely identified with experiments on laboratory animals, especially rats,

comparative psychology was a heterogeneous discipline in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century. The first French chair in experimental and comparative psychology was

73 Saint-Laurent, Chiens de défense, 49.See also de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 25-39.

74 ‘A thinking bird,’ Star, issue 7696, 4 May 1903, 2.

75 Pierre Hachet-Souplet, Le dressage des chiens sauveteurs (Paris: Institut général psychologique, 1907);

Baldin, Histoire des animaux domestiques, 96.

23

established at the Collège de France in 1888 and the Institut Général Psychologique created a

group devoted to animal psychology.76 At stake was the question of whether or not

continuities existed between human and animal minds and whether or not animals possessed

language and intelligence. Whilst some psychologists argued that animals were intelligent

creatures, others, such as Henri Piéron and Edward Lee Thorndike, dismissed their claims as

anthropomorphic and subjective.77 Police dog trainers were not trained psychologists and they

did not explicitly engage with the theories of Piéron, Thorndike and others. Yet the question

of animal intelligence, which had entered popular culture through stories of pets endowed

with incredible abilities, such as telepathy, framed their attitudes towards training.78 In

contrast to comparative psychologists, trainers sought to understand better animal minds not

to prove or disprove arguments over the relationship between humans and other animals in

the post-Darwinian world but to mobilize better animals so as to fight crime more effectively.

This was practical animal psychology tested on the fraught Parisian streets.

To hone their abilities, police dogs were expected to undergo a rigorous training

regime, echoing the longer and more in-depth training that human policemen received: the

police force had opened a training school in 1883, developed new crime detection techniques

76 Sofie Lachapelle and Jenna Healey, ‘On Hans, Zou and Others: Wonder Animals and the Question of Animal

Intelligence in Early Twentieth-Century France,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

Sciences 41 (2010), 14.

77 Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2007), 123-58. See also Robert Boakes, From Darwinism to Behaviourism: Psychology and the

Minds of Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Marion Thomas, ‘Histoire de la psychologie

animale: la question de l’intelligence animale en France et aux Etats-Unis au début du XXe siècle,’ L’homme et

la société, 167-69 (2009), 223-50; Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation,

Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

78 Lachapelle and Healey, ‘Hans, Zou and Others,’ 14.

24

based on finger-printing, centralized record-keeping and photography, and introduced new

specialist units, such as a river brigade service in 1900.79 A host of training manuals laid out

programmes for police dog training, which their authors claimed would lead to the formation

of effective and able police dogs. Like army dog training manuals, police ones asserted that

trainers needed to work with canine characteristics in a thorough and logical way.80 And as

with the human educational system in the Third Republic, which, alongside providing a

universal education, offered ‘advanced training’ for future cadres in the grandes écoles and

other elite institutions, dogs chosen for police dog work would, in theory, receive a level of

training that far surpassed those of other working dogs.81

The authors of police dog training manuals treated dogs as intelligent creatures who

required a methodical, sensitive and patient trainer to bring out their best. These were not

Cartesian animal-machines but adaptable and responsive animals who could be trained to

perform a range of complex tasks. The Belgian influence was once again apparent with the

publication of Joseph Couplet’s Le chien de garde de défense et de police (1909) and Gaston

de Wael’s Le Chien auxiliaire de la Police (1907). De Wael placed much emphasis on canine

intelligence. In his book’s preface, veterinary professor Hebrant asserted that dogs are ‘one of

the most intelligent animals’ whose ‘advanced functional development’ placed them ‘at the

top of the zoological scale.’82 De Wael similarly noted that the ‘marvels’ of their intelligence

were becoming more and more apparent. Drawing on the anti-Cartesian strands contained

79 Jean-Marc Berlière, ‘The Professionalisation of the Police under the Third Republic in France, 1875-1914,’ in

Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger (eds), Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism and Public

Order, 1850-1940 (Westpoint, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 44-7; Benjamin F. Martin, Crime and Criminal

Justice under the Third Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 80-1.

80 Vicard and Rode, Chein estafette, 62-3.

81 Carson, ‘Science of Merit,’ 186.

82 Professor Hebrant, ‘Préface,’ in de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 5.

25

within the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), and perhaps unconsciously

echoing wider debates about the relationship between instinct and intelligence in nonhuman

animals,83 de Wael argued that although dogs were often governed spontaneously by instinct

they could be trained to act intelligently. Instinct was a property that belonged to a species

and could not be developed, only suppressed. Intelligence, on the other hand, was a ‘faculty’

that could be developed in the individual animal through training and experience. A dog that

was constantly chained up, ‘whatever its race,’ would ‘always remain in a state of stupidity.’

Once a dog’s intelligence had been developed it would be able to repress those of its instincts

that inhibited police work, such as chasing cats and fighting other dogs. Canine intelligence

was sharpened through training, for although dogs ‘cannot reason’ their capacity to remember

events and experiences meant that they could associate ‘ideas in an empirical way.’ If a dog

re-experienced something, it would expect subsequent events to reoccur. Training should

therefore develop the dog’s ability to ‘think, which is to say to know, understand and

remember’ to allow it to ‘reflect’ upon what to do in certain situations. The dog would

therefore learn to associate finding a ‘wrongdoer or poacher’ with receiving a treat from its

owner. It could also develop the ability to calculate and assess danger in particular situations

and decide whether or not to attack. De Wael’s recognition of canine intelligence placed him

in opposition to Descartes. But neither, he pointed out, was he a follower of Montaigne who

‘lauds animals to bring down humans.’ It was, after all, ‘human intelligence’ that enabled

‘progress’ in animals.84

As human intelligence outstripped canine, dogs needed accomplished trainers for

them to become effective police dog, just as Rousseau-inspired educators argued that children

83 Dewsbury, ‘Issues,’ 752.

84 de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 9-11, 14, 35, 57, 60-1.

26

needed committed and skilled teachers to realise their full potential.85 Police dog training

manuals positioned the individual human-dog relationship as the crucial foundation of any

successful training regime. For de Wael each police dog should have its own master.86 Simon

agreed that trainers should only work with one dog so that there is the ‘most perfect’

understanding of each partner’s ‘will.’ In such a way, training would take into account the

‘psychology of each animal’ as every dog had a ‘particular soul,’ by which he meant a

‘character, a collection of qualities and flaws which are unique [to the individual dog] and

distinguishes him from his peers.’87 Such conceptualizations of animal psychology and

subjectivity were rooted in the trainers’ personal experience and observation of dogs. In the

debates on animal intelligence, police dog trainers were amongst those who believed that

better knowledge of animal capabilities would spring from personal encounters and

observations.88 Their stance stood in opposition to later experimental psychology approaches

that sought to remove the intersubjective aspect of human-animal relationships to isolate

animal capabilities within the experimental environment.89

The training manuals all emphasised that trainers needed patience and ‘kindness.’90

Lalloué preferred ‘caresses’ to ‘the whip and violence’ as training was an emotional and

reciprocal process in which dog and trainer became attuned to each other. A well trained dog

would feel ‘happy’ when it successfully completed a task as it could sense its satisfaction.

85 Zoologist Louis Boutan attempted to apply these educational ideas to apes. Thomas, ‘Histoire,’ 233-5.

86 de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 24.

87 Simon, Chien de police, 29-31. See also Couplet, Chien de garde, 91; Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 24.

88 Radick, Simian Tongue, 123-58.

89 Robert G. W. Kirk, ‘In Dogs we Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response-able Relations, and the Making of Mine

Detector Dogs,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50:1 (2014), 1-36; Radick, The Simian Tongue,

201.

90 de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 10, 56. See also Saint-Laurent, Chiens de défense, 25.

27

Furthermore, the trainer had to ‘love’ his dog. Even if the dog failed to achieve the task set

task, the trainer should only consider punishment if the dog was disobedient or acted from

‘bad will’ (mauvaise volonté).91 Punishment needed to be used sparingly as it could

physically harm the dog and damage its character, thereby undermining its suitability for

police work. Gersbach warned that violence would create a ‘slave that seemed obedient’ but

who would never become a ‘loyal companion’ ready to ‘share danger and sacrifice

themselves.’92 The notion that a police dog’s obedience to its master needed to come from

emotional connection and loyalty, rather than fear, echoed the bourgeois celebration of the

loyal family dog willing to defend the inhabitants of its home. Lalloué and others’ stress on

patience and encouragement also resonated with educators who condemned the corporal

punishment of children in late-nineteenth century France, instead insisting that rewards and

punishments should be rational, measured and appropriate. Dog trainers, however, may have

ignored the advice issued by Lalloué et al. and resorted to violence, just as some parents did

to their children.93

Having set out a framework for a productive training relationship, the training

manuals laid out a series of tasks that the well-trained police dog should be able to achieve.94

The police dog training curriculum started with simple activities, such as recall and lying

down, sitting, and standing on command, before leading to more complex ones, such as

91 Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 24, 34. See also Couplet, Chien de garde, 93-4. Saint-Laurent, however, argued that

the whip could be used ‘as a last measure’ if the dog was ‘in revolt.’ Chiens de défense, 29.

92 Gersbach, Manuel de dressage, 24.

93 Educators such as Félix Hément argued that children should act through a moral sense of what was right and

wrong and not fear of violence. Colin Heywood, Growing up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third

Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 161-5.

94 Some manuals, however, often offered guidance on the training of both kinds of dogs. Couplet, Chien de

garde, 123.

28

refusing to take potentially poisoned food from a stranger, barking when hearing a noise, and

finding a lost object.95 The tasks up until this point were not only pertinent to police dog

work: hunters required their dogs to find and carry objects, such as dead game. But

henceforth the tasks became more specific. Unlike bloodhounds trained for a particular aspect

of police work – detecting criminals through their scent – in nineteenth century Britain and

the United States,96 the police dogs depicted in Francophone training manuals were expected

to be all-rounders. The skills required of them were jumping over walls, hedges and ditches

and defending their master. In addition, they needed to be able to pick out an individual from

a crowd and disable a fugitive and guard them until their master arrives.97 According to de

Wael, individual differences between dogs would influence how well a certain dog would

adapt to particular exercises. ‘Energetic and courageous’ dogs would take better to defending

their master than ‘fearful’ dogs.98 A dog’s emotional state, as well as its physical and mental

attributes, was therefore taken into account when assessing its ability.

A tension between initiative and obedience sits at the heart of the training manuals.

For although trainers stressed the need for patience and kindness, power relations between the

dog and handler were hierarchical. According to the Pont-à-Mousson police commissioner,

training should produce a dog that possessed an ‘absolute [and] passive obedience’ that was

instantaneous and prevented the police dog from making unprovoked attacks.99 As such,

police dog training manuals blended Rousseauian educational methods (kindness, patience

and intelligence) with the aims of more disciplinarian educational theorists and animal

95 ibid., 96; Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 27-34; de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 43-4.

96 Neil Pemberton, ‘The Bloodhound’s Nose Knows?: Dogs and Detection in Anglo-American Culture,’

Endeavour 37:4 (2013), 196-208.

97 Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 37-40.

98 de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 51.

99 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson,’ 116-17.

29

psychologists, such as Hachet-Souplet, who argued that obedience and automatic responses

should characterise trained animals, just as they should soldiers and children.100

Crucially, however, the training manuals allowed some space for canine initiative and

individuality. They emphasised the importance of maintaining the dogs’ fine-tuned sensitivity

to their environment. To be an effective police auxiliary the police dog needed above all to be

a ‘scout’ (éclaireur) sensing danger through, in particular, its nose and ears and alerting its

master immediately to any threat.101 Police dogs were expected to adopt an alert and

responsive way of being in the world, assess risks and communicate them to their handler:

hardly the actions of automata. Moreover, trainers always represented the dogs as

intelligent and emotional animals and did not seek to eradicate these qualities, treating them

instead as the foundation of successful police dog work. A Foucauldian reading of police dog

training as a disciplinary process designed to create ‘docile’ dogs as obedient cogs in the

state’s crime and punishment system would therefore only very partially capture the

situation.102

A further tension, between nonviolent means and violent ends, marked police dog

training. On the one hand, there was a discourse of sensitive and emotional connection

between trainer and dog in which punishment was used sparingly, if at all. On the other hand,

100 Marion Thomas, ‘Are Animals just Noisy Machines?: Louis Boutan and the Co-invention of Animal and Child

Psychology in the French Third Republic,’ Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005), 441-2; Thomas, ‘Histoire

de la psychologie animale,’ 233.

101 Urban space reportedly posed a threat to police dogs; de Wael stressed that police dog handlers needed to

know what to do if there dog had been stabbed or shot. de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 53, 60

102 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991 [1975]). For a

contemporary critique of dominance in dog training, see Carri Westgarth, ‘Why nobody will ever agree about

dominance in dogs,’ Journal of Veterinary Behaviour [advanced online access – volume/issue nos to follow]

(2015), 1558-7898

30

French police dogs were expected to be ready to defend their master and attack assailants on

command. In his survey of European police dogs, British dog breeder and police and army

dog trainer Edwin H. Richardson identified French ones as the most violent, which he

explained by the ferocity of their criminal opponents: ‘the low, skulking, murderous, Parisian

Apache.’103 There are indeed glimpses of these violent ends within the training manuals.

According to Lalloué, the police dog needed to bite immediately anyone that its master

commanded it to, even if the dog knew that person well and had previously enjoyed their

company.104 Moreover, the emotional connection between dog and human was portrayed as

the foundation of canine ferocity. The Pont-à-Mousson police commissioner argued that the

dog’s natural affection for its master was the basis of its willingness to spring to their

defence.105 Police dog training thereby drew on the nineteenth century celebration of canine

loyalty, love and obedience and harnessed it to protect policemen through violence.

The manuals’ dehumanization of criminals served to justify these violent ends. They

made it clear that training exercises should enable police dogs to identify criminal types:

humans playing the part of assailants or fugitives in training exercises were encouraged to act

and dress like apaches or other criminals. Cesare Lombroso’s and other criminologists’

identification of “born criminals,” individuals whose psychology and physiology allegedly

separated them from law-abiding citizens and the wider cultural association of Apaches with

savagery, provided the context in which police dog training manuals could legitimate the

state-condoned violence embodied in the police dog. Police dogs’ capacity for violence was

treated as a social defence against supposedly pathological and incorrigible criminals who

some French criminologists compared to rabid dogs and other hazardous creatures worthy 103 Edwin H. Richardson, War, Police and Watch Dogs (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons,

1910), 23.

104 Lalloué, Chien de guerre, 27.

105 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson,’ 117.

31

only of eradication.106 Training enabled police dogs to become socially useful animals at a

time when criminologists turned criminals into dangerous beasts: the violent yet domesticated

police dog stood in opposition to the animalized and vicious criminal.

The dehumanization of criminals and the tension between nonviolent means and

violent ends within police dog training manuals echoed wider contradictions within the Third

Republic’s criminal justice system. Despite being the first long-term democratic regime in

French history, Republican tolerance towards criminality and deviance was limited. Although

the Republicans liberalised the press and protected the right to free speech in public places,

they campaigned against what they saw as public indecency, immoral behaviour and suspect

political opinions. In supposedly delinquent areas, such as Montmartre, Republicans banned

saucy cabaret posters, censored controversial press reports, and called for the police to

monitor behaviour in cafes and music halls. Alongside seeking to impose civic and moral

standards, Republican politicians introduced draconian punishments for crimes, in

collaboration with French criminologists. Driven too by post-Commune fears of social unrest

and the seeming emergence of a strand of habitual criminals resistant to reform, they

promoted solitary confinement in prisons, passed a law in 1885 to transport recidivists to the

colonies, increased police surveillance of released prisoners, and retained the death

106 Laurent Mucchielli, ‘Criminology, Hygienism, and Eugenics in France, 1870-1914: The Medical Debates on

the Elimination of “Incorrigible” Criminals,’ in Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, (eds), Criminals and their

Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2006), 211-13. It should be noted, however, that some French criminologists, such as Alexandre Lacassagne,

opposed Lombroso’s determinism. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics, 191. Rabid dogs have been associated

with criminality in France since at least the medieval period. Jolanta N. Komornicka, ‘Man as Rabid Beast:

Criminals into Animals in Late Medieval France,’ French History 28:2 (2014), 157-71.

32

sentence.107 Police dogs became unwitting enforcers of the Third Republic’s often repressive

and intolerant criminal justice system.108

But we should not assume that dog handlers followed the manuals’ prescribed course

of action. Dannhoffer, the policeman who trained France’s first police dogs in Pont-à-

Mousson, did not follow a training manual but claimed to have relied on his love of dogs and

advice from dog breeders.109 Furthermore, trained dogs did not always behave in the ways

expected of them. De Wael reported how one police dog he knew of would chase cats during

night patrols, catching 106 cats in 1906 alone. It was ‘useless’ to expect too much of this dog.

Trained police dogs could also be drawn into fights and the handler needed to make sure that

the dog’s ‘instinct’ did not override its training. If a dog did get into a ‘brawl,’ its handler

needed to check that this did not result in the dog losing ‘any of its qualities.’110 As training

107 John Kim Munholland, ‘Republican Order and Republican Tolerance in Fin-de-Siècle France: Montmartre

as a Delinquent Community,’ in Gabriel P. Weisberg (ed), Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 21-2, 30; Alexandre Lacassagne and Étienne Martin, ‘Anthropologie

criminelle,’ L’année psychologique 11 (1904), 446-56; Zachary R. Hagins, ‘Fashioning the “Born Criminal” on the

Beat: Juridical Photography and the Police municipale in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,’ Modern & Contemporary France

21:3 (2013), 291-96; Mucchielli, ‘Criminology, Hygienism, and Eugenics’; Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics;

Robert Tombs, ‘Crime and the Security of the State: The “Dangerous Classes” and Insurrection in Nineteenth

Century Paris,’ in V.A.C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social

History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), 214-37.

108 On dogs and state repression, see Robert Tindol, ‘The Best Friend of Murderers: Guard Dogs and the Nazi

Holocaust,’ in Hediger, Animals and War, 105-22; Aaron Skabelund, ‘Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields

of the “German” Shepherd,’ Society and Animals 16:4 (2008), 364-71.

109 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson,’ 116-7.

110 de Wael, Chien auxiliaire, 57

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was a process that could be reversed, the handler had to be vigilant to ensure his dog

remained suitable for police work.

Dogs had attributes, such as intelligence, that could be drawn out and developed

through training, transforming them into police dogs with increased abilities. But these were

seen as contingent qualities, echoing the wider belief that without enlightened human control

and companionship, dogs would degenerate, as shown by the behaviour of strays. As Baron

A.-C.-E. Bellier de Villiers argued, ‘the intelligence and the organism of the dog reflects, to

the highest possible degree, the moral and physical conditions of man [sic].’111 Concerns that

canine instinct would override intelligence, even under the guidance of skilled human

handlers, became even more apparent once police dogs began to patrol Parisian streets.

Police Dogs in Action

Policemen and sympathetic observers claimed that well-trained police dogs would act

as inexpensive and effective means of combating urban crime. But the Parisian press did not

take such claims at face value. Newspaper reports drew police dogs and their abilities into

Paris’s culture of spectacle, in which the journalists scrutinized and critiqued urban life.112

Although the press’s sensationalized attention mostly centred on human individuals and

institutions, it was directed, in this instance, towards human-nonhuman police dog

partnerships.

111 Bellier de Villiers, Chien au chenil, 10.

112 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999).

34

Many articles reported how dogs aided the police to secure the city. At times it was

the dogs’ physical strength that made the difference. Whether fighting off attacks on the

Paris-Brest postal service, defending Parisians and police officers from Apache attacks, or

uncovering couples indulging in acts of public indecency, the press praised the dogs’ physical

prowess.113 An article in Le Matin singled out Stop, a dog belonging to Brigadier Mitry in

Saint-Mandé, an eastern suburb of Paris. Stop’s speed, strength and ‘fearsome jaws’ enabled

Mitry to become the ‘terror of the “terrors.”’114 Elsewhere in France, the police dogs’ abilities

had reportedly helped reduce crime. In Pont-à-Mousson police dogs now deterred criminals

from attacking police officers at night, helping to secure ‘public tranquillity,’ according to the

town’s police commissioner.115 Police dogs and their emboldened masters now seemed more

than a match for France’s hardened criminals.

Journalists reported that police dogs’ threat to Paris’s criminals was such that they

began to mobilize their own dogs against police ones, as depicted in gory detail on a

November 1907 front cover of Les Faits-divers illustrés.116 Criminal gangs also allegedly

trained their ‘apache-dogs’ (chiens-apaches) to bring down solitary walkers in Paris’s

113 ‘La malle-poste défendue par les chiens de police,’ Le Matin, 25 October 1908; ‘La sécurité à Paris,’ La

Presse, 18 April 1907; ‘Les débuts d’un chien policier,’ Le Matin, 19 November 1907. Overseas newspapers also

reported on the police dogs’ success against Apache gangs. See ‘Police Dog puts Whole Apaches Band to

Flight,’ The Call (San Francisco), 12 June 1910; ‘Police Dogs: How they Work in Paris,’ The Examiner

(Launceston, Tasmania), 24 February 1911; ‘Police Dogs seize Apache,’ The Evening Argus (Owosso, Michigan),

9 April 1914.

114 ‘Stop, le chien du brigadier,’ Le Matin, 21 April 1907.

115 ‘Emploi des chiens comme auxiliaires de la police à Pont-à-Mousson,’ 120. See also Villers, ‘Chien,’ 363, 366.

116 ‘Chiens policiers,’ Journal des ouvrages de dames et des arts féminins, 1908, p.317; APP DB 41 A.-H. Heym,

‘Les chiens de police (suite et fin),’ La “vraie police,” 15 March 1902, 10; Les Faits-divers illustrés, 28 November

1907.

35

suburbs and disable them until gang members arrived to relieve them of their possessions. In

an echo of French customs officials’ tussles with smugglers’ dogs, police authorities ordered

their men to kill chiens-apaches.117

Like the training manuals, the press portrayed police dog abilities as multifaceted:

they possessed ‘remarkable intelligence’ as well as physical strength.118 This was the case

with Marcel, a police dog who spotted trouble brewing during a confrontation between a

group of young men and two apaches at Lilas, and managed to disable the gang members

until a policeman arrived.119 At times, the canine sense of smell made the difference. During a

police raid on a bar near Les Halles, two police dogs used their ‘disconcerting’ sense of smell

to uncover hidden guns, daggers, rubber coshes, and razors. Along with other new police

techniques – two members of Bertillon’s anthropometric team were also in attendance – the

use of police dogs helped capture 61 ‘suspect individuals,’ including renowned Apache chief

Le Chopier.120 Villiers similarly highlighted the extraordinary ability of dogs to detect

criminals. One German sheep dog reportedly tracked down a murderer over ‘fifty two

kilometres’ after sniffing his cap. Another dog had identified a murderer out of 800 factory

workers after sniffing the body of a murdered child.121 Such reports reinforced the narrative

that police dogs’ multiple abilities provided evidence of animal intelligence which human

ingenuity and savoir-faire now successfully mobilized.

At times, however, journalists were more critical of the dogs’ abilities and called on

the police to explain and justify their use. In March 1907 one of Le Matin’s reporters paid a

117 ‘Les chiens-apaches à Paris,’ L’Eleveur belge, no. 46, 14 November 1911, 738.

118 ‘Les chiens de police de Neuilly-sur-Seine,’ Le Petit Journal, 27 February 1907.

119 ‘Un chien policier arête deux mystérieux malandrins,’ Le Matin, 16 December 1913.

120 ‘A travers Paris,’ Le Matin, 7 June 1909.

121 Emphasis in original. Villiers, ‘Chien,’ 363.

36

visit to Max, a police dog living with Madame Thirouin on rue Nationale. Despite Thirouin’s

assertion that Max was an ‘intelligent animal,’ the reporter concluded that Max was ‘no

psychologist’ as he mistook him for an ‘Apache’ and began barking and straining on his

lead.122 Despite being trained by one of the foremost police dog trainers in France, Max was

unable, at least in this instance, to distinguish between an Apache and a law-abiding citizen,

much to Le Matin’s dismay.

Such concerns about police dogs’ competence meant that muzzles supplemented

training. Although animal protectionists had long-debated the ethics of the muzzle, the

muzzling of police dogs was treated as a necessary precaution to allay public concerns about

them biting innocent Parisians. A police dog bite would only be tolerated if permitted by the

handler, who had the job of releasing the muzzle, and if directed towards a presumed

criminal.123 The recourse to muzzling reflected doubts about the efficacy of police dog

training and the dogs’ trustworthiness and intelligence. Despite recognizing that dogs

possessed intelligence, many observers feared that they could not be relied upon to always

know the difference between a criminal and innocent person and that the dogs’ instincts

would override their intelligence.

Even with the use of muzzles, the risk of police dog bites could not be eradicated

entirely. Police officials therefore tried to argue that the benefits of police dogs outweighed

the risk of them biting law-abiding citizens.124 Press reports that stressed the police dogs’

obedience and the thoroughness of their training may have been partly intended to help

122 ‘Max n’est pas psychologue,’ Le Matin, 30 December 1907.

123 On muzzling dogs, see Dr Belloli, ‘La muselière des chiens,’ Bulletin de la Société protectrice des animaux,

vol. 8 (1862), 313-16; Maret-Leriche, A bas la muselière: pétition de messieurs les chiens et leurs maîtres

adressée à M. le préfet de police (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, 1861).

124 Heym, ‘Chiens de police.’

37

alleviate fears that police dogs threatened public security. Having witnessed police dogs in

training at Neuilly, one journalist reassured readers of L’Eclair that training ‘overcame’ the

‘instinctive brutality of the dog.’ Moreover, trainers only removed the dogs’ muzzles when

they were in pursuit of a known criminal. The law abiding citizen therefore had nothing to

fear from the police’s well trained canine ‘weapon.’125 However, fears persisted that training

had not completely overcome the dogs’ atavistic instinct to bite, stoked by apprehensions that

dog bites could lead to rabies. In 1909 a municipal councillor wrote to Lépine to protest the

alleged use of police dogs against political demonstrators. Similarly, the lawyer of a protester

arrested at a 1909 demonstration held in honour of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer at Issy-

les-Moulineaux complained about the ‘savage violence’ of the police dogs deployed against

demonstrators.126 The violent potential of police dogs highlights how nineteenth century

public concerns about police violence lingered into the twentieth century and were extended

to dogs.127 Police dogs, it seemed clear to some, were more likely to undermine public

security than protect it.

The concerns that police dogs’ abilities and intelligence were contingent and

potentially reversible qualities echoed biomedical fears that base instincts, desires and

impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality and lead to individual and

collective degeneration. For psychologists such as Ribot, ‘the nervous system was liable to

cumulative functional disequilibrium due to the tendency of the more fixed and stable lower

levels to overrun the higher, but more fragile and recently acquired, intellectual and moral

capacities.’128 Le Bon famously applied such ideas to the crowd in which the previously

rational man became a slave to his ‘unconscious personality’: ‘he is no longer himself, but 125 ‘Chiens policiers.’

126 ‘Les chiens de Police,’ Le Matin, 24 October 1909; ‘Tribunaux,’ Le Matin, 12 November 1909.

127 Deluermoz, ‘Circulations,’ 84.

128 Harris, Murder and Madness, 41.

38

has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by their will.’ Moreover, Le Bon

continued, ‘by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends

several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a

crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.’129 According to these

pessimistic viewpoints, frightening forces threatened to devour the fragile edifice of

civilization that held back the harmful energies unleashed by mass culture and urbanization:

even the highly-developed rationality and finely-tuned restraint of bourgeois males – the

supposedly most developed and educated members of society – could be overcome by

violence and deviant sexual urges. Likewise, violent impulses could overrun the highly

trained and controlled police dog, perhaps the epitome of the domesticated, skilful and useful

animal. The “beast within” had not been tamed.130

Conclusion

Parisian police dogs emerged within a particular set of conditions formed by

widespread fears of urban crime and insecurity, influential biomedical theories and new

understandings of animal intelligence. During this period of shifting human-animal relations,

trainers, handlers, and sympathetic commentators all portrayed police dogs as intelligent,

sensitive, loyal, skilled, and physically-imposing creatures that could make a difference to

129 Le Bon, Crowd, 52.

130 On the long history of the “beast within,” see Sahlins, ‘Beast Within,’ 38; Joyce. E. Salisbury, The Beast

Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994). On its expression during discussions of rabies

and sexuality in nineteenth century Paris, see Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, 97-114.

39

urban security. A series of tensions informed the deployment of Parisian police dogs,

including those between transnational exchanges and the specificity of Parisian urban history;

between police dogs as canine manifestations of the modern security state and the portrayal

of them as emotionally sensitive individual creatures; and between instinct and intelligence in

humans and animals.

In early twentieth century France, dogs appeared as more intelligent creatures than

had been previously thought and humans less so. But intelligence in both canines and humans

was a quality that could be lost through the re-emergence of primitive instincts and desires.

Although intelligent and useful behaviour in animals, and humans, could be cultivated, they

needed careful and constant surveillance by soi-disant experts, such as psychiatrists or dog-

handlers. Even then, however, public security could not be guaranteed. 131 This sense of

canine intelligence’s fragility was profoundly influenced by prevailing biomedical ideas

about evolution and degeneration and undermined the claims that police dogs could make

cities safer. For the police dog’s ability to act effectively against crime rested on its

responsiveness to training and its capacity to control and channel its aggressive instinct, all of

which relied on the cultivation of its intelligence.

Police dogs’ abilities and capacity to act were viewed as provisional and brittle. This

uncertainty helps explains muzzling and eventual demise of Parisian police dogs. By 1911,

145 police dogs helped police Paris and the Seine département.132 But their number had

dropped to 40 in 1916 and the Paris police discounted their use after the First World War. It

only reconstituted a limited police dog service in 1950 and it was not until 1965 and the

creation of a national training centre that police dogs became well established in France.133 So

whilst police dogs are now a commonplace presence in many cities around the world, the

131 Harris, Murders and Madness, 14.

132 Baldin, Histoire des animaux domestiques, 68.

40

problematic case of Parisian police dogs shows how the history of this canine arm of modern

state power was marked by experimentation and setbacks.

The history of Parisian police dogs also underscores the importance of human ideas

and institutions in framing the ‘agential conditions’ of animals that enable and constrain their

abilities. It demonstrates that assertions of animal abilities are rarely neutral or transcendent,

helping us to reflect on the political and intellectual backdrop of present day articulations of

nonhuman agency, such as developments in animal cognition research, the rise of animal

rights movements, a desire to democratize history through the inclusion of a wider range of

actors, and a problematization of the “human subject.”134 Although the greater recognition of

nonhuman agency is a significant and welcome development to capture better the hybrid

qualities of history, there is a danger that it will crystalize as an undifferentiated and universal

concept that glosses over the historically varied ways in which humans have engaged with

skilful and socially-meaningful animals. In light of such concerns, the charged history of

Parisian police dogs serves as a reminder of the historical specificity of animal abilities and

their mobilization.

133 By 1986, the French national police possessed 458 dogs, 315 of which were based in urban areas. APP 138

W 1 ‘Rapport,’ 26 October 1917; ‘Historique du club de chien de police’; Marlet, Profession chien policier, 28;

APP 138 W 1 Ecole suprieure des inspecteurs de la police nationale, Sous-direction de la formation continue, Le

centre national de formation des unités cynophiles, 1986, 10.

134 Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds, ed. Rational Animals? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Diane L.

Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States

(Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006); Harriet Ritvo, ‘Animal Planet,’ Environmental History 9:2

(2004): 204-220; Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La fin de l’exception humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

41

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